BUSCADOR

AUTORES

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

ÚLTIMAS NOTICIAS

TOP LIBROS

Luke Rhinehart

Luke Rhinehart is the acclaimed author of nine works of fiction, including most notably THE DICE MAN. In 1995, the BBC called that book one of the fifty most influential books of the last half of the twentieth century," and Loaded Magazine honored it in 1999 by naming it "Novel of the Century". Last year the London Telegraph named it one of the 50 great cult books of the last hundred years. Although first published 40 years ago, the book has been rediscovered in the 21st century, being published or republished in more than 60 countries and translated into 26 languages. It is currently selling more copies than ever and, amazingly, this resurgence of interest is led by young people--readers under 25.
According to Time Out, this book was one of the most fashionable novels of the early 1970s; and Anthony Burgess, the author of the unsettling "A Clockwork Orange" (1962), graced it with the comment "touching, ingenious and beautifully comic."

"The Dice Man" is a dark comedy, violent and hilarious at the same time; an upbeat precursor to the much grimmer "American Psycho" (1991) by Bret Easton Ellis, and the similarly satirical "The Elementary Particles" (1998) by the French author Michel Houellebecq. With a light touch and in mischievously entertaining fashion, the book plays with the fundamentals of the way we understand ourselves: rationality, identity, reality; in sum, all the ways in which we construct coherence from chance, or something from nothing.

Luke Rhinehart, the author (in fact, the real author's pseudonym) and narrator of the book, is the ultimate unreliable narrator. Luke's actions are largely dictated by chance. He writes down alternative actions and then tosses dice to determine which action to take. The result, he claims, is freedom to live different sides of his personality. As an author, for example, he lets the dice decide what he should write in his fictional autobiography with the title "The Dice Man" and what not; and the dice decide when he should lie and when not. Consequently, he announces on page one that he is the author of "the lovely first-rate pornographic novel, Naked Before the World" only to reveal much later in the book that the dice ordered him not to write about this piece of fiction in "The Dice Man." Too bad, dear reader.

The book works not only as a send-up of the psychoanalytic profession and the counter-culture of the late 1960s, it also succeeds at creating its own twisted reality - as attested by all the readers who felt that their view of the world had been profoundly changed by this novel.

It is ironic that "The Dice Man" has a cult following while the book makes fun of the cult of Dice Living created by the fictional Luke Rhinehart. In a sense the cult following includes the real author himself who produced a couple of sequels to this book. The irony should not come as a surprise, though. Authors who are seriously unserious run a high risk of creating ironic side effects. One of the earliest examples is the Daoist philosopher Lao-Tse (born BC 604). He blissfully ignored the irony in his "Dao De Jing," a book that declares in the first sentence "the Dao that can be told is not the real Dao" and then goes on for some 5,000 words to explain what the Dao is.

In sum, "The Dice Man" is recommended for readers who are willing to suspend the sense of their own importance for the sake of enjoying a fictional world, and to tolerate an alien system of morality for the time it takes to read this original and amusing satire.

Idioma Inglés
Publicación 1998
Editorial Overlook TP
Categoría Narrativa Contemporánea


Descargar The dice man de Luke Rhinehart